Recently, an active safety system that watches surrounding conditions of a vehicle and gives a caution to a driver has come to be mounted thereon. To provide information by the active safety system, a head-up display is often used to display information on the front window in front of the driver to reduce driver's sight-line transfer.
On the other hand, to operate on-vehicle information equipment typified by a car navigation system safely even during running, the voice operation using a voice recognition technology has been spread, and displaying a voice operation result using a head-up display makes it possible to achieve safer voice operation.
However, preparing the head-up displays for the on-vehicle information equipment and the active safety system separately will increase the cost. To solve such a problem, Patent Document 1 discloses an on-vehicle driving support information display device for providing the driver with information on safety around the vehicle as well as information necessary for vehicle traveling such as a navigation system. The on-vehicle driving support information display device comprises a display means for displaying an image; a navigation system for detecting the current position of the vehicle and for displaying it on the screen of the display means together with a map around the position of the vehicle; a vehicle-surrounding information display device for creating a bird's-eye view around the vehicle by combining images acquired with a plurality of cameras mounted on the vehicle and for displaying it on the screen of the display means; and an information selecting means for selecting to switch between the screen display by the navigation system and the screen display by the vehicle-surrounding information display device optionally by a touch screen or voice recognition means.
Patent Document 1: Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2001-116567.
However, a configuration such as the on-vehicle driving support information display device disclosed in the foregoing Patent Document 1, which shares the head-up display and switches it with the touch screen or voice recognition means, has a problem of being unable to provide the information from the active safety system quickly when a caution from the active safety system must be issued during the operation of the on-vehicle information equipment.
The present invention is implemented to solve the foregoing problems. Therefore it is an object of the present invention to provide an on-vehicle information providing device capable of providing the information from the active safety system quickly and preventing the operation of the on-vehicle information equipment carried out so far from coming to nothing.